Hello World!

Hi! Welcome to my little space on the dotcom world. I am a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania studying cell biology. Having a blog of my own has been on my to-do list since a long time now (like a couple of months maybe) and each time I think of this is when I hit upon or hear about another amazing story in science, history or literature and also when I think ‘now that makes a good anecdote’ based on my experiences and observations.

I thought for quite a bit about the blog title. Since I intend to make this less of a personal diary and more of a general and technical blog with most posts related to science, lab and research, ‘BasebyBase’ seemed a good one (alluding to the 4 bases in your DNA and how life builds on these). The goal for now is to keep it simple, try and reduce on the jargon as much as possible so any person can see what the big deal is all about as far as some of the great stories are concerned.

One such thing that comes to mind is what you're looking at - the first biological photograph(!) created by research groups at UT Austin and UCSF back in 2005. They grew E.coli in plates containing a sugar that turns black when digested by the bacteria. They engineered the bugs to digest the sugar only in the dark, i.e the gene that digests the sugar is turned off in the presence of light. A light image is projected onto the plate and depending on where these bugs were growing, you got either black or white and finally a living photograph. For more, read this work published in November, 2005 issue of Nature. Also for fun take a peek at more such fun images taken by these students here.

Though as much as we all like to write and share some interesting things with others, one of the compelling challenges of any blog is to keep posting on a regular basis. I hope to keep writing as often as I can and as much as I can. Thanks for stopping by and would appreciate any suggestions, comments and the like.